Douglas Whaley

Earlier in my teaching career I gave bar review lectures all over the country for a ten year period.   Thus I witnessed thousands of people facing bar exams, heard their concerns, gave them advice, and eventually developed a min-lecture I threw into the mix containing my advice on taking bar exams.   That lecture, somewhat developed, is below, but if some of it sounds familiar to readers of this blog it may be because a couple of thoughts are taken word for word from a prior post dealing with a similar topic: “How To Take a Law School Exam” (November 30, 2012).   It certainly won’t hurt you to read them again. A.   Before the Bar Exam 1. Calm yourself down .   Yes it’s the most important exam you will ever take in your life.   But, for the reasons I explain below, you are highly likely to sail right through the experience so that in a few months you will be raising you hand and swearing to be a respectable member of the bar.   If you graduated...

Professor Ehrman Recently I’ve been reading the fascinating books of Bart D. Ehrman, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, including “Forged” and “Jesus, Interrupted,” in which he explores how the books of the New Testament of were composed and settled upon for inclusion in the Bible.   Ehrman began life as a fundamentalist who attended  the  Moody Bible Institute  and graduated from  Wheaton College  in Illinois, earning his his PhD and  M.Div.  from  Princeton Theological Seminary .   During this period, as he learned how much deception and outright forgery went into the Biblical writings, he worked his way from devout evangelical to agnostic.   Scholars are in agreement that the books of the New Testament called by the names Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John were not written by contemporaries of Jesus, as most of us were taught in Bible classes, b...

When I decided to move to Florida for three months at the beginning of 2013 the question I planned to ask myself at the end of the period was whether the snowbirding experience was good enough that I’d be willing to do it again in 2014.   But midway into the second month I found myself asking myself a very different question: did I want to move to the Fort Lauderdale area permanently? At that same point if I’d have asked myself to rate the visit on a scale of one to ten the answer would have been “ twelve .”   Why was the answer that high? Wilton Manors, Florida, where I was living is an almost exclusively gay environment.   Before moving here, like everybody else straight or gay, I’d lived only in an almost exclusively straight environment.   It was a shock seeing men casually kissing each other on the street as old friends met, and finding restaurants filled predominantly with tables full of men, laughing and talking, obviously having a grand gay time. ...

. Nottingham, England I’ve done bookreadings from my atheist thriller, “Imaginary Friend” (available both on Amazon and Kindle) in four different states (Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, and Florida, with Kentucky to be added next month) but yesterday was a first: a reading in Nottingham. England!   Since I’m currently snowbirding in Wilton Manors, Florida, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale, the ability to connect in this way across an ocean is a first rate marvel. It took some experimentation ahead of time to make sure it would work, and that the Secular Society of Nottingham was able to project my image up on a screen, but in the end there were no glitches.   There was about a three second delay between when I said something and the audience reacted, and I had to learn to adjust for that.   Before I figured that out I thought my jokes were falling flat.   I did my usual half hour reading, which consists of two selections from the novel having the most to do with a...

.   It’s a popular phrase: “ I don’t believe in coincidences .”   You hear it all the time in actual conversations, movies, TV, etc., and particularly in detective fiction.   The problem with uttering it is that it immediately identifies the speaker as dimwitted.   With billions of people interacting, billions of events occurring, billions of catastrophes (large and small) causing their misery each and every day, well then, billions of coincidences will occur.   They’re a routine part of life.   To imbue them with some sort of mysticism is romantic twaddle or muddled thinking. All right, sometimes when the detective in the story says “I don’t believe in coincidences,” what is meant is “I don’t believe this was accidental, but planned.”   If that’s so, the statement is merely messy, not wrong.   What the detective should say is ““I don’t believe this was a coincidence.”     [Click to enlarge] But if the speaker truly mean...